Call for Papers:

New Challenges of Interactivity in Narrative Creation
Special issue of Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image
https://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/announcement/view/79

Deadline for submissions: February 15, 2026

Narrative as a form of communication is one of the most important modes of human cognitive perception and understanding. In recent years, emerging media have significantly shaped that process, leading to new developments, opportunities, and challenges for the narrative form and its creation.

In history, with each new media technology innovation—from the invention of writing to the printing press, and from the mass distribution of video to digital games—the relationship between narrative form and its audiences has changed. This process has intensified. The proliferation of screens and the widespread use of the internet and smartphones enable individuals to access written, audio, audiovisual, and multimedia narratives on a personalized, permanent, and persistent basis. This fuels the expansion of media convergence and the emergence of transmedia narratives, fictional worlds shared across platforms and devices that can impact social, cultural, and political realities. Narrative has shifted from the domain of the storyteller into a process marked by reciprocity, negotiated between the author and the recipient.

In this space, users’ agency and interactivity have introduced new opportunities and challenges to traditional understandings of narratology, prompting a redefinition of the discipline. The rise of multilinear narratives has called for a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach. For example, interactivity in cinema and television promotes the creation of hybrid artifacts, which require multidisciplinary tools and methods tailored to their unique modes of expression and narrative processes. Likewise, narratives created for digital media platforms forge connections with cinematic storytelling and literature through intertextuality, aesthetics, and narrative structure. Similar origins can be traced to theater, board games, and many other forms, leading to new processes of interactive narrative creation and audience meaning-making.

Added to these challenges is the ease and diffusion of narrative production. Everyday devices, free applications, and artificial intelligence are sufficient to generate sophisticated narratives that can reach millions of people. Yet, they can also be ignored or quickly forgotten. Subsequently, the value of narrative has been reduced even as it is used for education, entertainment, influence campaigns, propaganda, and social engineering.

This special issue seeks to reflect on how social, technological, and cultural elements have transformed the very process of narrative creation. It hopes to explore the relationships between media platforms, technologies, and how they establish audience agency, interactions, and attention. The issue is interested in these topics across media types and domains from online forums, fandom, social movements, mobile devices, immersive media, games, and more.

Articles may focus, although not exclusively, on the following lines of research:

• The process of creating interactive narratives from films, digital games; microdramas, web series, intermedia, and other digital platforms;
• Next-generation AI tools in narrative production;
• The impact of media globalization on narrative construction;
• Development of new narrative formats;
• Modes of interaction in narrative;
• Narratology in the face of new challenges in digital culture;
• The impact of social media on narrative construction;
• Narrative content as an increasingly central component of social media;
• Modalities of representation and identity in interactive narratives;
• Evaluation and usability of interactive narratives;
• Interactive narrative as a tool of marketing and propaganda;
• Uses of interactive narrative in the global North and global South and by indigenous peoples or fringe groups;

This thematic dossier is coordinated by Francisco Merino (University of Beira Interior), Jorge Palinhos (Porto School of Arts) and Joshua A. Fisher (Ball State University).

FRANCISCO MERINO, originally from Viseu, holds a bachelor’s and doctoral degree in Communication Sciences from the University of Beira Interior. He has been a lecturer in the Film Studies program at the University of Beira Interior since 2006 and directed the Film Studies degree program between 2016 and 2020. His research focuses on topics related to Television and New Media, Expanded Cinema, New Cinemas, and Digital Storytelling.

JORGE PALINHOS is an author, researcher, and professor. He has collaborated with various entities in the development of theatrical, radio, site-specific, intermediate, immersive, and virtual reality pieces, and written or collaborated on screenplays for several live-action and animated works. He is a lecturer at the Porto Higher School of Arts and the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, and a researcher at the Arnaldo Araújo Center for Studies.

JOSHUA A. FISHER is an associate professor at Ball State University in the Center for Emerging Media Design and Development. His research focuses on community and interactive storytelling using AI and immersive media. He is the editor of two collections, Augmented and Mixed Reality for Communities and An Educator’s Guide to Interactive Digital Narrative. Fisher’s research has appeared in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, the Journal of Interactive Narrative, and Journalism Practice, as well as in the proceedings of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (Springer), ACM Foundations of Digital Games, IEEE Conference on Games, and the International Conference of the Learning Sciences.

SUBMISSIONS

The deadline for full and original papers is February 15, 2026.

The submitted papers will be evaluated by the editors and by blind review of external reviewers. The text should have less then 8000 words and include, in Portuguese and English (and Spanish, if that is the paper language): title, abstract with less then 300 words and a maximum of 6 keywords.

Before submitting your paper, please check https://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/submit-paper

SOME SUGGESTED REFERENCES:

Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.

Aston, Judith & Gaudenzi, Sandra. 2012. Interactive Documentary: setting the field. Studies in Documentary Film. 6(2), 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1386/sdf.6.2.125_1

Bellini, Mattia.2022. “Interactive digital narratives as complex expressive means.” In Frontiers in Virtual Reality 3. 854960. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virtual-reality/articles/10.3389/frvir.2022.854960/full

Bode, Christopher & Dietrich, Rainer. 2013. Future Narratives. Theory, Poetics and Media-Historical Moment. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Chinita, Fátima & Palinhos, Jorge. (ed.) 2024. Ekphrasis, vol.31/1. Reconfigurations: New Narrative Challenges in Moving Images. Cluj-Napoca: Babeș-Bolyai University. https://www.ekphrasisjournal.ro/docs/R1/31e0.pdf

Domsch, Sebastian. 2013. Storyplaying- Agency and Narrative in Video Games. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Fisher, J. A. 2023. “Centering the human: Digital humanism and the practice of using generative AI in the authoring of interactive digital narratives.” In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 73-88). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-47655-6_5

Mendes da Silva, B., Carrega, J. (eds).2021. The Forking Paths: Interactive Film and Media. Faro: CIAC. ISBN:9789899023536. https://ciac.pt/publicacoes/The-Forking-Paths-versao-eletronica.pdf

Murray, Janet. 2017. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Updated edition. Boston: MIT.

Koenitz, H., Eladhari, M. P., & Barbara, J. 2024. “Can AI Create an Interactive Digital Narrative? A Benchmarking Framework to Evaluate Generative AI Tools for the Design of IDNs.” In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 160-180). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-78453-8_11

Koenitz, H., Barbara, J., & Bakk, A. K. 2023. “An ethics framework for interactive digital narrative authoring.” In The authoring problem: Challenges in supporting authoring for interactive digital narratives (pp. 335-351). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_21

Mateas, Michael, and Andrew Stern.2003.  “Façade: An experiment in building a fully-realized interactive drama.” Game developers conference. Vol. 2. https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~michaelm/publications/mateas-gdc2003.pdf

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2022. A New Anatomy Of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Serbanescu, Anca, and Frank Nack. 2024. “Towards an analytical framework for AI-powered creative support systems in interactive digital narratives.” In Journal of Entrepreneurial Researchers 2.1. pp. Pp. 097-115.

Silva, Cláudia. 2023. “Fighting against hate speech: a case for harnessing interactive digital counter-narratives.” In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-47655-6_10

AIMS AND SCOPE OF THE JOURNAL

Founded in May 2013, Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image is an international and interdisciplinary journal published, in an electronic format (online), twice a year (in January and in July) on behalf of the Portuguese Association of Researchers of the Moving Image (AIM). Aniki was created to promote the links between Portuguese-speaking and international scientific communities devoted to film and media studies. Accepting a wide range of empirical, historical, and theoretical perspectives, the journal provides this world-wide scholarly community with a specialised platform to debate all types of moving image, from arthouse, popular and non-theatrical films to television programmes, videos, and video games, digital cultures, sound and music in film, among other topics of interest.

The journal is committed to the publication of original, open-access, peer-reviewed, and high-quality research in three main international languages (English, Portuguese, and Spanish) and everyone can submit to it. The editors are keen to publish articles that are knowledgeable of and engage with key international debates and approaches.

Apart from research essays which have undergone double-blind peer review, the journal publishes interviews, book reviews, conference reports, critical reviews of art exhibitions and reports of international film festivals. Each issue includes a thematic section guest-edited by internationally recognised experts in the field, which is widely announced every six months in an open call for papers.

Aniki has no submission or publication fees and provides immediate open access to its content. The journal is currently sponsored by the IHC – Institute of Contemporary History (FCSH-UNL), through the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology (FCT) under projects UIDB/04209/2020, UIDP/04209/2020 and LA/P/0132/2020.

Aniki’s Rules of Procedure were approved by the AIM General Assembly and can be downloaded here.